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Hi,

The problem that you ran into is what I’ve come to call the “upgrade downgrade” problem: FeedWordPress strongly encourages you to upgrade MagpieRSS to a newer and much more capable version than the one packaged with WordPress, but when you upgrade your version of WordPress, one of the files that you get in the upgrade package is a brand new copy of the old and busted MagpieRSS, which overwrites your upgraded version. In the most recent versions of FeedWordPress. I discuss the problem (from back when WordPress 2.5 was released) here: http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/blogs/radgeek/2008/04/18/upgrade-downgrade. Current versions of FeedWordPress should put up a loud warning in the WordPress Dashboard if you log in after inadvertently reverting your copy of MagpieRSS. Let me know if this failed to happen for you; if so, I’ll investigate a bit to try and figure out why you weren’t notified of the problem.

Eventually (as in, within about 2-3 releases from now), I intend to transition FeedWordPress from MagpieRSS to the much more advanced SimplePie package which is now included with newer versions of WordPress. But it’s going to be somewhat tricky because the existing filtering interface is based around MagpieRSS implementations, so I need to write a compatibility layer if I want to avoid breaking other people’s filters.

If you’re curious, the reason you got posts with just capital “A,” in particular, it was probably because the feed you were syndicating included MediaRSS extensions, and in particular a media:content element. (WordPress.com feeds, for example, include MediaRSS meta-data by default.) The old version of MagpieRSS had a bug in its parsing code that mangled post contents if it encountered any other element named “content,” even if it was in a different namespace. My customized branch of MagpieRSS eliminated the bug, but, as mentioned, when you upgraded WordPress it temporarily reverted MagpieRSS back to the old and busted version, which lost that upgrade.